Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

political affiliation etc. Furthermore, it is assumed that it is a symbolic emblem of ”high”
vs. ”low” status in the official hierarchy (here operationalised by length of education) rather
than e.g. an emblem of ”type of education”. If the latter was the case, one might find large
differences between e.g. people with long educations within the human sciences and others
with long educations within business, differences which might be shaded when these two
groups are paired together to form ”long education”. It is likely that such differences do exist,
but unfortunately the only information about education given in the survey is its length, so
such an effect can not be evaded. On the other hand, in grouping all types of long educations
together, one combines the groups which have the most capital in Bourdieu’s terms. The
business executives are regarded as having the most ”material capital”, but the intellectuals
(i.e. within the humanities) are regarded as having the most ”symbolic capital”. Thus in com-
bining the two one can claim to grasp the elite of society, though elite here counts as a so-
mewhat larger percentage of the population than would usually be counted as elite.
The test hypothesis for the study is that the official policies, as expressed by the notion of
“linguistic consciousness”, are in line with the sentiments of higher social strata, the elite,
since it is formulated by language professionals in the countries and sanctioned by the politi-
cal elite. Promotion of the official language policy would, in other words, act as a symbolic
emblem of belonging to the elite. Such a finding could be interpreted as to mean that the offi-
cial policy goes relatively unquestioned and has strong support. The reverse would mean that
the official policy is formulated by language planners without support from the elite, and
would pose a problem for the official policy. Of course one could argue that if the lower strata
support the official language policy to a higher degree than the higher strata, this is a sign of
the official policy being in accord with the general population. The problem of this argument
is, if one accepts a Bourdieuian model of society, that it is a weakness for the language plan-
ners that their support is not among their ”own kind” viz. the elite, but among, as it were, their
socially opposing groups.
For this study, as mentioned above, ”class” is operationalised by dividing the populations ac-
cording to degree of formal education. This is done on the one hand because of ”degree of
formal education” being probably the most objective expression of social class in a broader
sense, and on the other, because educational data are easily accessible from the survey mate-
rial.
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